Gord Starter Guide and Guide Hub

Our Gord Starter Guide will help you to wrap your head around the basic mechanics and concepts you’ll need to survive the swamps! 

If you enjoy this guide, we have various guides for other games, such as our Remnant 2 Simulacrum Guide, or our How to Play Pokemon TCG Like a Pro guide.

When you first start out in Gord, there are a few elements that aren't common to either strategy games or settlement management games. We’ve gone over them below to make understanding them easier. 

The Basics of Gord

Exploration

Of the main gameplay elements in Gord, the most important, and easiest to misunderstand, is exploration. This is primarily a game about exploring a hostile environment and unraveling its story, so you should always be exploring the map.

The reason exploration is so important is that nothing happens in the game without it. You need a scout out exploring the map to uncover new resource nodes, to find the horror/quest objective, and it's the only source of rare resources like gold during the early hours of any given scenario. 

This means you should be setting up actions for your villagers to take while your attention is mostly on your scout. 

Sanity

Like a lot of horror titles, there is a sanity meter in Gord, but this sanity meter is mostly used to keep your entire settlement's mental health under control. 

It’s a scary world out there, and being out in the dark and the unknown will start to take its toll on your villagers. That said, you also need to keep sending some of your villagers out to gather supplies and explore the wilderness. 

Make sure you always keep an eye on your villager's sanity meters, and make sure you light up areas where they’ll be spending a lot of time or have a brewery to help repair lost sanity. 

Light

Light, as mentioned above, plays a huge part in Gord. If your villagers are spending time outside of light, they’ll lose sanity, but light also makes you easier to spot for enemies, and enemies easier for you to spot. 

Build light sources near all of your regular resource collection spots, and ensure you’re lighting up any pathways that your villagers regularly use towards any outposts you’ve set up. 

Faith

Faith is basically the ‘magic’ mechanic of Gord and works shockingly similar to Black & White in many ways. 

Faith requires you to build temples and assign villagers to pray at them. With enough prayer you unlock access to varying levels of spells you can cast from on-high. 

These spells range from damage-dealing spells, to support enchantments to make your villagers stronger or healthier in seconds. They can seriously make or break each run, so ensure you’re investing in Faith early. 

Horrors

Horrors are basically ancient natural gods that are living in the uncharted wilderness outside of your Gord. In each scenario or chapter you play, there will be a horror somewhere on the map that you’ll eventually have to deal with. 

While you can ignore these horrors initially, you’ll either stumble across them accidentally, or they’ll “make their presence known” by debuffing you and your villagers.  They’ll typically demand some sort of tribute from you, either some sort of arbitrary gift/quest or literally the wholesale slaughter of one of your villagers. 

How to Beat Any Scenario in Gord

There are a few key strategies that will help you to obtain success no matter what sort of scenario you’re attempting to beat. 

Use Map Features

Not only is the map filled with monsters, it's also filled with treasure. Whether it's traders, the hut of hermits, or even random piles of gold, there's plenty useful to you in the wilds. 

In particular, keep an eye out for towers like the one above. Interacting with them can reveal big portions of the map to you. Also obviously look out for gold, and those scrolls are pages for your Chronicle if you're inclined to get them. 

Don’t Ignore the Horror (or Fight It) 

Horrors are incredibly powerful and incredibly annoying to deal with, so it can be tempting to put off finding them for far too long. Just no that ignoring the Eldritch God in your backyard is going to bite you in the ass. 

If you’re in a story chapter and can plan ahead for the demands you know are coming: do it. If not, you need to get your basics taken care of and then seek out the Horror as soon as you are able to do so. 

Find the horror when you’re ready. You ideally want a controlled interaction with the horror on your own terms, not a frantic search for them once you’ve received their demands. 

Also, don’t fight the horror. You will die. Horribly. Horrors are incredibly difficult to kill, so unless you’re really confident in your skills then you should avoid combat at all costs. That said, it’s almost worth trying it once, just so you can see what happens. 

If you're that determined, at least check out our Horrors Guide first for some tips. 

Check on Resources Constantly

Check on your resources as often as you can. Not only should you make sure you’re not hitting your storage limits (and if you are, consider re-assigning villagers to other jobs) but you also need to keep an eye on how many of each resource is left in each gathering spot. 

It takes a long time, but resource spots do eventually run out of goods to give you. If you leave the clock running at full tilt you might run out of resources before you’ve noticed they’re starting to dwindle. 

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